Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  She sank down into one of two armchairs in the studio, rejects from a yard sale somewhere, sometime, and put her head in her hands.

  “What is this? What’s happening to me?”

  “I done told you, I don’t know, didn’t know sixty years ago and don’t know now. All’s I do know is that little drowned girl … she ain’t drowned yet. She’s still alive now. Not for long, though. She’s gonna drown, die, and apparently some other folks is gonna die along with her.” He paused.

  “Unless…”

  “T.J.” Dobbs only said his name. But the look he gave him was probably a whole paragraph of communication in T.J./Dobbs-speak. “You sure you want to go there?”

  “Unless what?” But Bailey knew what.

  “We saved your life, and until that happened, we didn’t know if … We thought maybe once his mama painted something, it was going to happen, destined to happen no matter what.”

  “But you didn’t save me. I did pull the trigger. The only thing that saved me is the fact that the bullet didn’t do what it was supposed to do. I’m not alive because you interfered. I’d be just as much alive, would be sitting right here, right now if you hadn’t shown up on my doorstep that night and tried to talk me out of it.”

  “You b’lieve that, do ya?”

  She merely looked at him.

  “You think seeing that picture of yourself with a hole in your head didn’t change nothing? You sure about that? You sure you didn’t hesitate, pull back at the last second?”

  He let the words hang out there in the air between them. Bailey couldn’t speak.

  “Sheriff McGreggor told me the doctors said the angle of the bullet wasn’t straight in. If it had been, it would have tore through the center of your brain and you’d be dead.”

  It’d be nice if Dr. Villa and No Name Doctor had imparted that significant piece of information to her. And maybe they had. She did, after all, ignore almost everything they said to her.

  “The bullet entered at a slant, a pretty severe upward angle, and lodged next to your skull. Couldn’t a’done that unless you tilted the gun barrel, like at the last second you was pullin’ away.”

  Bailey shook her head in total confusion. Had she changed her mind at the last instant, the last millisecond? And if she had, was it the painting that’d caused her hesitation?

  She had absolutely no idea, and with a certainty she could attach to few things in her life right now, she understood that she would never know. Retrograde amnesia had permanently erased that information.

  “So you think…” Bailey edged out there onto the fragile ice again, farther this time, so close to the bottomless abyss in her mind, the dark ditch of lunacy, that she could feel the cold wind from it blowing on her face. “You think this little girl hasn’t drowned yet, and that maybe she doesn’t have to drown? Is that what you’re saying?”

  It was what he was saying, but T.J. backpedaled from it, pulled away from the enormity of the possibility. Like Bailey’d pulled away from the bullet.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying.” T.J. got up and began to pace. “I come here today to warn you about what I knew was gonna happen to you, that’s all, so you wouldn’t think you was crazy … or a witch.” He gestured toward the wet painting on the easel. “I didn’t know there was gonna be, that you was gonna paint—”

  “Well, you knew I was going to paint something besides butterflies and cancerous tumors! What were you expecting? When I did what you knew I was going to do, painted…” She didn’t finish the sentence, just gestured toward the wet canvas. “What were you planning to do about it?”

  “I didn’t have no plan,” T.J. shot back.

  “Yes, you did.” Dobbs’s melodious voice was quiet. “We both did. We never talked about it, but we both did.”

  He said nothing more, merely looked at T.J. Finally, T.J. let out a breath.

  “I don’t know how many of these paintings my mama done after she fell and hit her head, before she hung herself from a barn rafter three years later.”

  Bailey might have gasped. She couldn’t tell. She was so riveted on his every word she was barely aware of anything else.

  “And she lived what she painted, just like you did. And once she’d painted something, she … I don’t know, it was like she was connected to the people she painted in some way. I think maybe she seen or felt or heard things they did, sometimes, until … whatever she’d painted, actually happened.”

  He stopped pacing, stood in front of Bailey. She looked up into his earnest face and a terrible foreboding came over her, an understanding that beyond his words was a world she never dreamed existed, one far beyond where the wild things were. She thought of what Brice had said when he brought her home, how he’d left Kavanaugh County and traveled to Away From Here, a place on the other side of the spot on ancient maps where it said, “Beyond here be dragons.” Beyond T.J.’s words was an unexplored world, a universe that likely contained horrors bigger and nastier than dragons.

  “I think what drove my mama to hang herself wasn’t just that she’d come by this incredible ability she didn’t want, didn’t understand, that terrified her — an ability my father told her was witchcraft. I think what put her over the edge was the fact that she knew these people was gonna die, knew how they was gonna die, sometimes even when they was gonna die, and she never lifted a finger to help them. I think that ate a hole in her soul.”

  “And this little girl…” Bailey didn’t look at the portrait but deep into T.J.’s luminous eyes. “She’s going to drown unless … You think we have to warn her, don’t you? You think we have to save her.”

  “I think we got to try.”

  Dobbs’s deep voice spoke into the silence that followed.

  “It isn’t just her, either. You said there were other people, an explosion. Must be one of those big boats out on the lake. Something blew up and it sank and all the people on it were thrown into the water to drown. This little girl did. Sounds like other people did, too. It’s more than one life. More than one little girl.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bailey put on a pot of coffee for T.J. and Dobbs. She was still nursing the Diet Pepsi in a glass with almost-melted ice cubes. Then they wandered with their cups and saucers back into the studio instead of sitting at the kitchen table. They had been drawn there. The magnetism of the incredible painting on the easel was a powerful thing.

  Approaching it as tentatively as if it were a rattlesnake about to bite, Bailey stood in front of it, looking at the little girl lying on her back in the puddle, drawn not just to the content of the portrait but to the design and execution of it. It was an incredibly intense piece of art. Not just that it was a dead child, but the immediacy of it, the detail that Bailey couldn’t believe had been painted in — what? She looked at the clock on the wall.

  “Are you telling me I painted this in less than half an hour?”

  “You were flying,” Dobbs said.

  Bailey had been painting her whole life. She had never had any illusions about her level of talent, was very sober about it, in fact. She was a solid B art student and would never rise above that level. She believed what the writer Stephen King said about writing applied to art as well. He said that hard work and practice could make a mediocre writer into a good writer. But no amount of work could change a good writer into a great one. The bridge that separated good from great was talent.

  But Bailey didn’t care that she’d never be a great artist. She believed she painted well enough to earn a living at it — though she’d been wrong about that part — and that was enough because she painted for the pure joy of it. She had done crayon drawings as a child, using bright, primary colors, only a handful out of the whole box of sixty-four. Which now represented for her the disorder of the thoughts in her brain. But they were gradually sorting themselves out, going back into the box where they’d been before. There was still a mess, but not what it was when she and the ceiling tile became BFFs.

  In all the
years she had painted, in all the hundreds of pictures she had done in that period of time, including the years as an art major at Tulane University, she had never created anything with the exceptional excellence of this work of art. And that’s what it was, just as the picture T.J.’s mother had painted of her was.

  She froze, then turned and went out to the porch and picked up the painting she had tossed out at them that T.J. said his mother had painted before Bailey was born. The strut on one side was broken, the canvas torn, but she picked it up carefully, took it into the house, into the studio and set it on an easel, then she moved the easel to stand next to the one with fresh paint, the piece of art she had created in less than half an hour of furious painting only a few minutes earlier.

  T.J. saw it immediately.

  “They’s the same, ain’t they?”

  “What’s the same?” Dobbs asked.

  “The style, the brushstrokes, the … it’s called a ‘signature’ in the art world and takes into account different visual elements in the work that—” She looked at the blank faces of the two men and gave up. “If I had the right equipment — infrared spectroscopy, gas chromatography, that kind of thing, I think I could prove it. But right now, all I can give you is an educated opinion. If I were an art critic called in to authenticate these paintings, I would say unequivocally that the same person painted them both.”

  That was a conversation stopper.

  “How can that be?” Dobbs said.

  “How would I know?” Bailey realized she’d snapped at him and patted his shoulder. “I don’t understand any of it.”

  She stepped closer, reached out trembling fingers to the blank spot on the canvas where the little girl’s face—

  The instant she touches the canvas, she is drowning again, fighting the water, desperate to come up for air. Her head lifts for an instant out of the water and she utters a wordless cry, a scream of panic and desperation, coughing. She sputters, cries out—

  She was back in the studio, a wailing scream that ended in “Heeeeellp!” exploding from her throat as Dobbs steadied her, his big hands on her shoulders.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded a voice from behind her.

  All three of them jumped in surprise and turned to find Kavanaugh County Sheriff Brice McGreggor standing in the doorway of the studio with his gun drawn, held out in front of him in a two-handed grip.

  Brice McGreggor pulled his patrol car to a stop at the curb in front of the Watford House. He didn’t pull into the driveway because there were already two cars there. One of them belonged to Bailey Donahue, the other one was, unless he was mistaken, the old Ford pickup T.J. Hamilton drove.

  He got out of the car and approached the house, and as he did, he wondered at the connection between T.J. Hamilton and the woman who had tried to kill herself in this house. T.J. had come to him, asked him questions about the case while she was still in the hospital. He’d told the old man everything he wanted to know, and accepted on the face of it that T.J. was just curious to find out what had happened to the woman he met one afternoon who tried to blow her own brains out that same night.

  Still, T.J.’s interest was … odd, itched in that particular spot in a police officer’s mind where cop-gut instinct resided.

  And while he was considering the grumblings of his gut instinct — or maybe just hunger since he’d only had a Starbucks coffee and a roll for breakfast — he forced himself to face square-on that his own interest in the case didn’t pass the sniff test, either. He’d not kept his emotions in a tight-fisted grip where Bailey Donahue was concerned because she’d been safe, Sleeping Beauty, a woman he’d allowed himself to care about precisely because it could never go anywhere. But she’d broken the rules of Fairy Tale-dom, had opened her eyes sans a prince’s kiss, and now Brice had to shove the genie back into the bottle — mixing those fairy tales again. Bailey would have to be relegated to a place among all the rest of humanity’s women. Beyond the yellow-and-black barricade tape: Police Line Do Not Cross.

  He stepped up onto the porch and noticed a scrap of canvas lying beside the screen door. He picked it up and thought it might be a piece of the painting he had shown the art teacher at the high school. Apparently, Miss Donahue had decided she didn’t like the picture. No surprise there. Who would like a picture of themselves dead? She must have destroyed it.

  Through the screen door, he watched Sparky bound across the room, tail wagging, to greet him. That was T.J. Hamilton’s pickup in the driveway. He smiled at Sparky, who sat expectantly on the other side of the screen, as he drew his hand back to knock. Then he heard a scream, a piercing, terrified wail from inside the house, and a woman’s voice cried out, “Help!”

  Sparky turned and raced out of the room barking and Brice was inside the house in seconds, gun drawn. He cleared the living room with one broad sweep, edged carefully down the hallway behind the dog — that had abruptly stopped barking — and stepped to the open doorway of a room where three people stood looking at a painting on an easel. Beside it was the not-totally-destroyed painting of Bailey on a second easel.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded, even as he recognized the three people, who were turning toward him in apprehension.

  The sheriff instantly pointed the gun at the floor, then holstered it.

  “I heard a scream,” he said. “A cry for help.” He looked at Bailey. “Was it you?”

  She looked confused, glanced at T.J. as if to ask him what she should say, which was definitely odd.

  “I did. Yes. I was painting a picture…” She gestured to the one on the easel. “And I … was feeling what … I felt like I was drowning.” She sat down heavily in the chair next to the easel. “I’m sorry, I’m … my mind is a very scary place right now.” Then she almost smiled. “I’d advise against going anywhere near it. Beyond this point be dragons.”

  Brice stepped to the painting on the easel. The paint was still wet, as if it had just been applied. It was a painting of a little girl lying on her back in a puddle — the child had no face, but everything about her posture made clear what her face would have revealed. She was dead.

  He looked from that picture to the one beside it. It was the picture he’d thought Bailey had destroyed. It was damaged; one of the struts was broken and a piece of canvas was missing, the one he’d picked up off the porch. He looked from the picture of the child to the portrait of Bailey and back to the little girl. He didn’t know art, but the style of both pictures was strikingly similar.

  “So … you did paint the self-portrait?” he said, then realized an explanation was in order. “I saw it here the night of the 911 call.” He saw no reason to explain further, to tell them he’d had the picture examined by the high school art teacher.

  “No, actually, I didn’t. I only painted that one.” She indicated the drowned-child picture.

  “But it looks like the same person painted both of them,” he said.

  “Maybe the same person did,” Dobbs said.

  They all turned to face him.

  “And that means?” the sheriff asked, totally confused.

  “Nothing,” Dobbs said. “I was just thinking about … never mind.”

  “You do realize, don’t you, that none of you is making any sense?”

  T.J. looked at him with tired eyes.

  “You don’t know all the facts, son. I guess it’s time you did.”

  When T.J. was finished with his tale, Brice didn’t know whether to wind his watch or take third base.

  He had never heard anything as strange and fanciful as this. Strange he could handle, but fanciful … not so much. If Brice McGreggor was anything, he was grounded in reality. He didn’t read fiction, saw no point in it. It was make-believe. Movies and television shows fell into the same category, entertaining but useless. Even before his life circumstance had locked his future in chains, imprisoned him in a lifestyle as devoid of expectations as he could make it, he was a practical, pragmatic man. Sensible. But this…?


  It was so far the other side of sensible UPS didn’t even deliver there.

  There was nobody in his life for whom Brice had more respect than he did T.J. Hamilton. He was a fellow Marine, and not just any Marine, a decorated war hero. Brice could not for the life of him come up with any reason the man would make up such a tale. A tale backed up by Dobbs. Brice was one of only a handful of people in the county who knew Raymond Dobson was way more than the “good ole boy” folks saw, that he’d become a millionaire before he was thirty and had retired to live modestly in his hometown. Why would a man like that invent such a fantasy? And then there was the evidence in front of him, the painting the art teacher had told him was more than half a century old. The rest of it, though, the tale of pictures T.J.’s mother painted without looking at them, that depicted events that hadn’t happened yet…

  He struggled to order his thoughts, forced himself to think sequentially, the linear logic of a law enforcement officer. He let the whole story lie, left it where it was, in all its fanciful ambiguity and took the next sequential step, the one he’d have taken if he had believed every word T.J. Hamilton said.

  If it were true, then…

  “Your mother painted this picture of Bailey sixty years ago, before Bailey was even born. What makes you think this picture of the little drowned girl isn’t a picture of some other child who isn’t even born yet?” That was a logical, reasonable question, applied to a circumstance that was neither. “If these are portraits of what hasn’t happened yet, maybe this won’t happen for twenty years, forty years, fifty.”

  “This here little girl is alive right now. And she’s going to be dead in less than a week unless we can figure out who she is and come up with a way to keep whatever boat she’s on from blowing up.”

  “And you know that because…?”

  T.J. pointed to the top of the little girl’s hand. Her arm was lying across her body with her hand on her chest, palm down, almost like she was pledging allegiance to the flag.